London Review Bookshop Podcast

’Samuel Fisher’s prose moves with swift and sure tread across the glinting particulars of locality, until that condition, that curse, with its pains and pleasures, becomes universal. Our fate. Our challenge. Our discarded future' – Iain Sinclair

In a London ravaged by climate change, where the few survivors suffer from an epidemic of chronic pain, accompanied by haptic and visual hallucinations known as ‘migraine aura’, Ellis wakes from his first bout of the illness in a ruined bookshop. Accompanied by the bookshop’s former owner Sam, he embarks on a psychogeographic quest through the city in search of his ex-girlfriend Luna. Fisher’s third novel Migraine (Corsair) confronts vital issues of environmental collapse, and asks what kind of society might survive in the face of it. He was in conversation with the poet and essayist Helen Charman, author of Mother State.

Kim Hyesoon is one South Korea’s foremost poets. Her groundbreaking and radically feminist poetry – ‘a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism’ (Griffin Prize Judges) – has been translated into English by poet Don Mee Choi for over a decade.

We celebrate the latest of these translations – the Griffin Prize-winning masterpiece on mourning and survival, Autobiography of Death, now published for the first time in the UK by And Other Stories – with an evening of readings from Kim and discussion of her work with Will Harris, whose latest collection is Brother Poem (Granta).

In The Original (Scribner), Nell Stevens’s second novel, Grace Inderwick grows up as the ward of a cold Victorian family in which the only warmth and affection is provided by her cousin Charles. After many years missing at sea, Charles returns to the household. But is this the real Charles or an impostor? Nell Stevens brilliantly reconfigures the familiar trope of the returning stranger as a gripping meditation on forgery and authenticity, in life, in art, and in love.

Nell Stevens was joined in conversation by essayist and novelist Olivia Laing, whose most recent book is The Garden Against Time.

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From the LRB:

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Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠

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In 1958 the 18-year-old Liliane Lijn left New York for Paris, determined to become an artist. Her captivating memoir Liquid Reflections (Hamish Hamilton) tells the story of her meetings with poets, painters, philosophers and revolutionaries and of the development of her groundbreaking artistic practice, pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and feminine mythology. Now resident in London, Lijn was in conversation about her life and work with Jennifer Higgie, former editor of the art magazine frieze and author of The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World.

Twenty years ago Kathryn Scanlan (Kick the Latch, The Dominant Animal) acquired a diary at a public estate auction. It was kept by Cora E. Lacy, an eighty-six-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town, from 1968 to 1972. Scanlan began to compulsively read and reread the stranger’s diary. In the years following she edited, arranged and rearranged the diarist’s words into the composition that is Aug 9 – Fog.

Scanlan was joined by Emily LaBarge, whose book Dog Days was published in autumn 2025.

More from the Bookshop:

Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠⁠

From the LRB:

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subsbkshppod⁠

Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crbkshppod⁠

LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksbkshppod⁠

Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storebkshppod⁠

Get in touch: [email protected]